Crooked Little Vein - Warren Ellis

“So that’s one Special, one Ma’s Dainty Plate, and one Cattle Mutilation, ruined. Drinks?”

“Ma’s Dainty Plate?” Trix scowled as the waitress rolled off. “I should’ve had the Special.”

“The Special’s for men only. Says on the menu,” said Bob, flapping the damp cardboard pamphlet at us. “See? ‘The Special—For Men.’”

“You get a club to kill it with, too?” Trix said, deeply unimpressed.

“I wish!” Bob laughed. The waitress returned with drinks. I reached for beer like a drowning man. Not that drowning men tend to want beer. You know what I mean.

Bob was given a veritable pot of iced tea. It was so full of sugar that the straw stood up. You could see Bob’s chest laboring to suck the stuff up into his head. The surface of the drink moved in slow viscous waves, like a lake of tar.

Bob sighed and belched. “I tell you,” he smiled, “when you find a place in this town that does good iced tea, you stick to it like glue. So. Let’s talk about your case.”

Again, I gave him the lightest details—missing book, handed around all over the country, collector wants it back but isn’t sure where it ended up, paper trail leading to the Roanokes. “What we need to do is talk to the Roanokes and find out if they still have the book. All I need to do is confirm that I can turn it over to the client afterward.”

“So we need to get you inside the ranch. Mano a mano, eh?”

“Something like that. Just a conversation.”

“You don’t just turn up on the Roanokes’ doorstep, Mike.”

“Well, this is why I’m talking to you, Bob. You’ve got the local knowledge. How do we get in to talk to them?”

“Heh. That’s the one Regis used to ask for the million-dollar prize.”

“Just the conversation. Not trying to deliver legal documents on them. It’s a five-minute thing. How do we get in the door?”

“The Roanokes… They’re not big on people, Mike. Especially since the whole politics thing blew up in their faces.”

“Yeah,” Trix said. “I was wondering about that.”

“The Roanokes don’t understand why they’re not the Bushes, is the short version. They’re old oil money, older than the Bushes. Old Man Roanoke spent some time in Joint Special Operations, deep spook stuff, has all kinds of weird friends. They figured they could jump right over building a power base in local politics and go right for the brass ring. The Old Man took a shot at kingmaking in the eighties, and that went wrong, so all his hopes were pinned on Junior.

“But what you need to get, Mike, is that the Roanokes are not normal. I mean, this isn’t just ‘the very rich are not like you and me.’ There are stories.”

“Uh-huh.” I busied myself with beer.

“What kind of stories?”

“Oh, you just had to, didn’t you, Trix?”

“I want to know. I couldn’t just leave that hanging in the air.”

Bob snorted.

“What’s so funny about that?”

“Well, one story says that’s how the Old Man was conceived. See, when guys are hanged by the neck, when their neck breaks they usually ejaculate. And apparently when the Old Man’s pop hanged himself, his mom scraped up his spooge and, well…shoved it up herself. So, you know, ‘hanging’…it just made me laugh, I’m sorry.”

There was a clanking of cutlery on ceramics. The middle-aged couple sitting next to us had stopped eating, and were looking at Bob like they wanted to unload six-shooters in his face.

“See?” Bob rasped, leaning over the table. “They’ve got friends fucking everywhere.”

The doors to the kitchen banged open. The waitress emerged behind a long steel trolley, which she pushed with much pantomimed effort toward our table.

On it was a horizontal section of a bull. As if someone had taken a steer, chainsawed the sides off, and chucked the middle part on an eight-foot-long steel platter on wheels.

It still had a horn sticking out of it.

It was served blue; cold, basically, just seared to seal it and slapped on the plate. If it had still had both sides, a good vet could’ve gotten it up on its feet in an hour or so.

The waitress parked it at the end of the table, and gave Bob outsized, sawtoothed cutlery. “Message from chef,” she growled. “He said to tell you that if you don’t eat it all—again—he’s going to take you outside and kick your nuts up into your lungs.”

Bob laughed nervously. “What does he mean, again? I was sick last time. And the time before that, I ate it all, and neither you nor he were working that night. I ordered the Special, I’ll eat the Special. Get me some steak sauce.”

Trix and I must’ve been staring. Bob looked at us as he sawed off a chunk of microcooked steer and forked it onto his plate. It oozed clotted blood from the thick veins sticking out of the meat. “This is real Texas food,” Bob said. “This is what we eat. Great fucking country, Texas.”

I thought Bob was going to start crying again as he chewed the raw meat.

“Delicious,” he mewled.

We sat there for five, ten minutes, silently watching Bob painfully shovel raw beef into his big, crushed face. Thankfully, our own food arrived at that point. A pound of meat on a flowery plate for Trix, and a huge chunk of rump for me. I turned it over with my fork. The skin was still on it. The skin’s brand was still intact. A big R.

“Your fries,” the waitress announced. A metal pail of fries with what looked like a gallon of melted cheese poured on top.

“I asked for the small portion,” Trix said.

“That is the small portion,” the waitress said.

Trix gave me a little smile. “I guess I know how they justify serving fries in a place that only serves stuff that came out of a cow.”

“You got to eat it all,” Bob muttered stickily. “It’ll look bad for me otherwise.”

Trix gave him her sweetest look. “Bob, I like you. I’m trying to make you feel comfortable. But, honestly, if you think I’m going to eat all this shit, you can just suck out my farts, okay?”

The middle-aged couple got up to leave. Bob choked back a sob and went back to his hideous dinner.

Trix met my eyes. “What? I’m only human, Mike. Though I might not stay that way if I eat all this. They’ll be pulling cholesterol out of my veins with a bulldozer.”

“Quit moaning. My dinner’s still got the skin on it.”

“You’re kidding me.”

I lifted up one cheek of my pan-fried ass to show her the brand.

“R?”

“Roanoke.” Bob coughed. “They’re in the cattle business, too. It’s a sign. Oh my God. Oh my God.”

He forked another squirting chunk of beef into his mouth, looked up at the ceiling fan, and started yelling as he chewed. “Look! I’m eating it, you bastards! I’m eating it all!”

Bits of meat flew out of his mouth, hit the fan, and were evenly distributed all over the restaurant.

Chapter 25

Bob ate the entire damn thing, but was paralyzed afterward. After some cajoling, we arranged to briefly borrow a wheeled office chair from the restaurant’s back room, and trundled him out to the parking lot in it. He was still sucking scraps of flesh off the horn, and bellowing that he’d showed them, he’d showed them all. Oh, and that the chef was a whore.

“Fuck this,” I said. “Get the keys from him. I’ll drive. We’ll dump his crazy ass in front of the hotel and pay someone to move him or kill him or something.”

“This is how you treat your friends?”

“He’s a nutbag, Trix. Look at him.”

“Whooooores,” said Bob.

“There you go. Get the fucking keys.”

Trix patted him down and found the keys in his inside jacket pocket. “Thank God,” she groaned. “I wasn’t up for checking his pants.”

Bob studied her with one eye, oddly drunken. “Mike never had the pretty girls before. How does he get the pretty girls now? I’m a goddamn Texan.”

“You always talk to your buddies’ girls like that?” she frowned, tossing me the keys.

I nearly dropped them.

“That’s how I get into trouble.” Bob teared up. “I’m so lonely.” And, just at the point where we softened, he added, “Whooooores.”

I opened up the rear door and tipped him into it.

“What about the chair?”

“Leave it here. They called that rump well done? If I’d poured my beer on it to wake it up it could’ve skated its way home in that damn chair. Get in.”

“Oooh. Masterful.”

“I’ll spank you right here in the parking lot.”

“Promises.”

“Just get in the car.”

As we pulled out of the parking lot, Bob seemed to pull out of his meat fugue a little. “Left at the lights. Something I want to show you.”

“Whores?”

“No. Roanoke.”

I looked for Trix’s take. She shrugged. “It’s what we came for.”

I took us left at the lights, and a handful more directions took us out of town. The dark came in hard. Trix looked up out of the window. “Stars,” she said. “You don’t see so many in New York. You don’t realize.”

“Kill the lights,” said Bob, “and pull over here.” We did, by a low wooden fence.

“Get out and look into the field.”

“What are we looking for, Bob?”

“You’ll see.”

The night air was warm. The fence surrounded a large field littered with sleeping cattle. We wandered to the fence, put our feet on it, and waited.

“You look tense,” Trix said. “Have a cigarette while we’re waiting for whatever we’re waiting for.”

“The lighter flame will screw up my night vision.”

“Huh,” she said, thoughtfully. “You’re a real detective, aren’t you?”

“What did you think I was?”

“A cute, crazy guy who just fell into a crappy job. I don’t think it ever occurred to me that you were, you know, a real detective. Knowing about things like night vision sounds like real detective stuff.”

“Well, at least I’m still cute.”

“I like funny-looking guys.”

“Oh, thanks.”

She giggled and hugged my arm. “You are just too easy to tease. Look. The cattle are waking up.”

They were. And starting to move. Scattering. There was motion in the middle of the herd. Something running. I squinted, leaning in.

There was a naked man among the cattle. Silver hair in the starlight. Deep lines in his face when he moved out of the shadows of cows. Thin and leanly muscled, he sprinted between the frightened cattle, zigzagging wildly.

He stopped sharply as one cow moved diagonally in front of him. And then sprang like a jungle cat, landing on top of the beast. There was something in his hand that sparkled in the starlight. Wire. He drew it between his fists and made a looping motion under the cow’s throat.

The naked old man garroted the cow with great industry, bringing it down. Hard muscles in his upper arms worked under gray skin. The cow twitched, shat itself, and died.

The old man clambered over the carcass and began to suckle at the dead beast’s udders. Then crouched, face shiny with corpse-milk under the stars, threw his head back and howled like a wolf into the night.

We silently returned to Bob.

“That’s Old Man Roanoke taking his nightly exercise,” Bob whispered. “G. Gordon Liddy gave him that garrote.”

Chapter 26

We drove back to the hotel in silence. Bob said he felt well enough to drive, so we stood there as he jammed himself back behind the wheel of the car and took off. We watched his car fishtail down the street and, a block and a half down, bury its front end in the door of a sports bar. Bob slumped out of the car door onto the street like a harpooned whale as the engine caught fire. Many large men came out of the bar with a surprising array of impromptu weaponry in hand.

“Fuck it,” I said, and went inside.

“I’m going to stay here a minute,” said Trix.

“You want to help him?”

“No, I want to see what they do to him. I’ll be up in a minute.”

There was someone waiting for me in the hotel room.

“So you think the Roanokes have it?” the White House chief of staff said, tying off in the armchair in front of an evangelist channel on the TV.

“Oh, God.”

“That’s good, Mr. McGill. Very good. We didn’t know that. As you’re probably aware, my president can’t run for office again, unless we. Ha ha. Unless we change the Constitution. Can you imagine if Junior Roanoke had gotten to Washington? If he’d filled a room with the lawmakers, the great and the good, stood there at his lectern, opened the book and slammed it down? The Founders didn’t imagine a time of radio and television. Politics was done in real time, with physical crowds. Just showing the people the pages on television, or reading them on radio, won’t work. People have to be in the presence of the book, for its acoustic effect to work. If he’d ever been able to address serious audiences, the outcome would have been terrible. I don’t think the Roanokes fully understand what they have.”

I flopped into a chair. “What do you want?”

“I’ve gotten you an appointment with the Roanoke family for tomorrow morning at eleven. If they have the book, you’re empowered to make them an offer of ten million dollars for it, contingent upon their permanent silence concerning its existence.”

“I see.”

“If they refuse, you’re to use your cell phone to call 555 555-5555. Let it ring twice, and hang up.”

“That’s not a real number. 555 is the fake area code Hollywood movies use.”

“We gave it to them. It works for us. Ring twice, then hang up.”

“What happens then?”

“A fuel-air bomb of some description, I believe,” he said, injecting himself with something brown and lumpy. “It’ll look like the gasoline reservoir under their ranch went up, they tell me. Eleven o’clock, then. Good hunting, Mr. McGill.”

He stood up to leave, shakily. “Oh, and don’t worry, I haven’t taken heroin in your hotel room. I have a cage of genetically modified green monkies that express anticancer pharmaceuticals in their feces. Once a day, I have to inject dilute monkey turds. But it’s better than dying, yes?”

“I’d have to think about that.”

“Mmm. I imagine you would.”

At the door, he stopped again.

“One more thing, Mr. McGill. The girl.”

“Is none of your business. You’re just the client. You don’t get a say in how I do my job or who I spend time with.”

“Aren’t we scrappy these days, Mr. McGill?”

“I’ve not been in the best mood lately, for some reason.”

“You don’t enjoy your work, Mike. It is very sad. The girl, Mike, is a crazed omnisexual vaginalist with a string of lovers from genders they don’t even have names for yet. She’ll break your heart, Mike. Take my advice. Get your own room, put your pants on backward, and wear boxing gloves. It’s good for you. Trust me. I’m the White House chief of staff.”